I get annoyed with something, and then I go “I’ll buy/build this gadget, and that will make me less annoyed”. Which is true — I’ll be using the gadget for a while and almost every time I use it I’ll think “well, this really fixed that annoyance”. Success!
But then the gadget invariably breaks down, and I have to fix it.
And when you are so easily annoyed as I am; i.e., you have as many gadgets as I have, it seems to happen almost constantly.
Like this week — I had some electricians in to get some more juice in, and also replace some ancient downlights, and fix some issues, and etc etc. Which means taking the electricity for the apartment, and then flipping it on and off again a few times at random.
So I’m careful to switch all my actual computers off for real before they arrive, but I forget about some gadgets — like this box I have in the kitchen that plays music for me.
So after the electricians left, the screen was semi-dead, and after rebooting, the screen was totally dead.
*sigh* Time to do some debugging.
The thing is a Raspberry Pi 4, and after fishing it out of the box, it had a temperature of about 60C, which seems high? And it’s a Pi, which is notorious for having flaky HDMI, so is the problem the Pi or the screen?
The nice thing about Raspberries is that you can just put the SD card in another Pi and then boot up, and…
No, still the same problem, so it’s not the Pi.
But! Then it fixed itself!?
It’s alive! So it was the Pi!
And then rebooting again and…
So it’s not the Pi!
The screen is a Japanese Comics Screen 2, which was one of the very early small screens that were launched on Kickstarter, so…
But what if it’s the power supply? It’s USB powered, and powering via the Pi is perhaps just a tad too little juice? Even though it’s worked perfectly for two years?
So let’s get a USB wall wart in?
Yeah, OK, with the power directly from a USB wall wart it seems to work reliably?
Yes indeed — I’ve now rebooted it ten times, and it works every time.
So… either that was the problem, or it’s just something that’s going to reoccur in a couple of weeks.
It’s probably the cable.
I love debugging hardware!
In conclusion: I should probably get more gadgets to fix the problems I have with my gadgets.